Futures Up; Penney Keeps Sliding, Genworth Keeps Rising

By Sam Mamudi

Futures for the leading stock indexes are up ahead of the bell, and seemingly on track for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to pass (or get very, very close to) its nominal closing high of 14,164.53.

Shares of J.C. Penney (JCP), which have fallen almost 25% in the past week, continue to slide, down 3.2% on heavy volume.

The latest Penney sell-off may have been triggered by a Reuters report last night which cited an unnamed source as saying that Vornado Realty Trust (VNO) is selling 10 million Penney shares. Vornado is Penney’s third-largest shareholder and Vornado’s Chairman Steven Roth sits on Penney’s board.

Genworth Financial (GNW) stock leads the Standard & Poor’s 500 before the bell, up 3.4%. Genworth rose 6.7% yesterday and is up 50% in the past three months.

In corporate news, the New York Times reports that this blog’s parent company is planning to launch a new sports network, Fox Sports 1. It seems that Rupert Murdoch and Chase Carey have spent long enough admiring the amount of cash ESPN prints for Disney (DIS), and finally decided that News Corp. (NWSA) should have a piece of the action:

Murdoch has plans to challenge ESPN head on and claim some of the lucrative revenue that the sports media giant has had largely to itself for more than three decades.

On Tuesday, Fox will announce its intention to start Fox Sports 1, an all-sports network, in August…

ESPN brings in more than $6 billion annually from its industry-high subscriber fees. It owns the rights to televise Major League Baseball; the N.F.L.; the N.B.A.; Nascar; tennis; myriad collegiate conferences; the Bowl Championship Series and its new playoffs; and a raft of other sports. Both ESPN and ESPN2 have 98.5 million subscribers.

At a gathering of 300 executives last month at a Hilton Hotel in East Brunswick, N.J., Mr. Corbat proposed a slate of new, more-rigorous ways to track both the performance of individual executives and the third-largest U.S. bank as a whole, said people who were there. His approach includes score cards that will rate top managers across the New York company in five categories…

The quantitative focus is the sharpest sign yet of how Mr. Corbat is likely to differ from his predecessor, Vikram Pandit, who was forced out by the board in October after a series of mishaps. More clues to Mr. Corbat’s thinking are likely to come Tuesday, when he is scheduled to speak to analysts and investors at a financial conference in Boston hosted by Citigroup.

The initiatives are designed to bring more accountability and discipline to a company that has been considered by regulators, politicians and some investors as too big to manage after it required $45 billion in government aid to stay afloat during the financial crisis.

The Federal Reserve’s purchases have driven interest rates to near zero. This has stimulated the economy but not without cost. Savers, particularly older ones trying to live on income from their investments, are starved for safe options. They’ve been forced into stocks, which is one reason the market has been acting as if it’s on steroids. Further, with borrowing costs low, Congress and the White House have less incentive to rein in the national debt. Rock-bottom interest rates have also distorted markets…

That’s a good reason to start thinking about an endgame sooner rather than later. The longer the Fed’s easy-money policies go on, the greater the risk they will distort markets, create new bubbles and set the economy up for another fall.

About Stocks To Watch

Earnings reports, corporate strategies and analyst insights are all part of what moves stocks, and they’re all covered by the Stocks to Watch blog. We also look at macro issues, investor sentiments and hidden trends that are affecting the market. Stocks to Watch gives you the full picture of the U.S. stock markets, all day long.

The blog is written by Ben Levisohn, a former stock trader who has covered financial markets for the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and BusinessWeek.